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Topic: Non-fast food drive thrus (Read 19586 times)

You can buy beer at just about any corner store but, for wine or liquor you have to go to a liquor store. Liquor stores can carry things like wine glasses and and books about alcohol but you can't buy beer, soft drinks or snacks.

Until a couple of months ago you couldn't buy hard liquor anywhere in the city. City is in the top 50 biggest. The liquor stores were the same size as everywhere else. They just filled the space with lots and lots of wine and a better beer selection. I do remember the first time I went into a 7-11 and Mondavi wine was next to the Big Gulp machine.

We don't have alcohol at supermarkets here, but the bottle-o normally is near a supermarket anyway.

It depends where you live in Oz.

My local Coles has a liquor aisle and the Woollies connects to a bottle-o (can enter it from the store or from the mall proper). At the other shopping centre I visit regularly, it's more like Katana_Geldar describes.

Many, if not all, of the small suburban grocery stores in my city also have a decent range of beer, wine and spirits, although the prices are a bit higher (in general, not just for liquor).

Those ones you have to make a separate transaction though - ALDI now has an actual in store section with alcohol - you just need to go through a specific register - like when you buy cigarettes. But its all one transaction.

We don't have alcohol at supermarkets here, but the bottle-o normally is near a supermarket anyway.

It depends where you live in Oz.

My local Coles has a liquor aisle and the Woollies connects to a bottle-o (can enter it from the store or from the mall proper). At the other shopping centre I visit regularly, it's more like Katana_Geldar describes.

Many, if not all, of the small suburban grocery stores in my city also have a decent range of beer, wine and spirits, although the prices are a bit higher (in general, not just for liquor).

Those ones you have to make a separate transaction though - ALDI now has an actual in store section with alcohol - you just need to go through a specific register - like when you buy cigarettes. But its all one transaction.

We don't have alcohol at supermarkets here, but the bottle-o normally is near a supermarket anyway.

It depends where you live in Oz.

My local Coles has a liquor aisle and the Woollies connects to a bottle-o (can enter it from the store or from the mall proper). At the other shopping centre I visit regularly, it's more like Katana_Geldar describes.

Many, if not all, of the small suburban grocery stores in my city also have a decent range of beer, wine and spirits, although the prices are a bit higher (in general, not just for liquor).

Those ones you have to make a separate transaction though - ALDI now has an actual in store section with alcohol - you just need to go through a specific register - like when you buy cigarettes. But its all one transaction.

Heck, you can get wine and beer at Walgreens now. That freaked me out the first time I saw it.

No separate transaction is required at that Coles supermarket. The registers have a lighted sign above them that indicates if they are ok to process alcohol or not.

Not sure about the Woollies with the connected liquor shop - been a while since I've purchased anything with alcohol from there.

I completely forgot about the Aldi. Had noticed their wines. They offer a different choice to most other shops.

Really? What state are you in? I'm in NSW (Sydney) and I've not seen that at a Woolies or Coles here. Some stores have the internal doors but you can't take liquor back into the main store to buy it and yoyou can't get a whole trolley load at the liquor store - no proper registers.

We don't have alcohol at supermarkets here, but the bottle-o normally is near a supermarket anyway.

It depends where you live in Oz.

My local Coles has a liquor aisle and the Woollies connects to a bottle-o (can enter it from the store or from the mall proper). At the other shopping centre I visit regularly, it's more like Katana_Geldar describes.

Many, if not all, of the small suburban grocery stores in my city also have a decent range of beer, wine and spirits, although the prices are a bit higher (in general, not just for liquor).

Those ones you have to make a separate transaction though - ALDI now has an actual in store section with alcohol - you just need to go through a specific register - like when you buy cigarettes. But its all one transaction.

Heck, you can get wine and beer at Walgreens now. That freaked me out the first time I saw it.

No separate transaction is required at that Coles supermarket. The registers have a lighted sign above them that indicates if they are ok to process alcohol or not.

Not sure about the Woollies with the connected liquor shop - been a while since I've purchased anything with alcohol from there.

I completely forgot about the Aldi. Had noticed their wines. They offer a different choice to most other shops.

Really? What state are you in? I'm in NSW (Sydney) and I've not seen that at a Woolies or Coles here. Some stores have the internal doors but you can't take liquor back into the main store to buy it and yoyou can't get a whole trolley load at the liquor store - no proper registers.

I'm in the ACT. The Coles is the one I regularly shop at & I just shove the wine in the trolley with the rest of the shop. The liquor aisle has been there for a few years now at least. Assumed it was a Coles thing.

Will suss out the Woollies with attached store later - admit I'm curious now. Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same as those you've encountered. The other nearby woollies doesn't have an attached liquor outlet - you have to go elsewhere in the mall.

I'm in the ACT. The Coles is the one I regularly shop at & I just shove the wine in the trolley with the rest of the shop. The liquor aisle has been there for a few years now at least. Assumed it was a Coles thing.

Will suss out the Woollies with attached store later - admit I'm curious now. Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same as those you've encountered. The other nearby woollies doesn't have an attached liquor outlet - you have to go elsewhere in the mall.

I think its an ACT thing. I vaguely recall that being a novelty last time I was shopping down there.

I'm in the ACT. The Coles is the one I regularly shop at & I just shove the wine in the trolley with the rest of the shop. The liquor aisle has been there for a few years now at least. Assumed it was a Coles thing.

Will suss out the Woollies with attached store later - admit I'm curious now. Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same as those you've encountered. The other nearby woollies doesn't have an attached liquor outlet - you have to go elsewhere in the mall.

I think its an ACT thing. I vaguely recall that being a novelty last time I was shopping down there.

Just taking us all back to the drive-in pharmacy discussion, which by the way makes a huge deal of sense when you are talking about keeping children in the car and keeping germs from spreading. I just wanted to point out that pharmacies (also called chemists) in Australia are quite different to those that I saw when I was in the US. I went into a few Walgreens and to me they were much more like a grocery store with a small pharmacy section. Pharmacies here tend to be smaller stores with just medicine and personal products, but with a smaller range than a grocery store. So you might have vitamins, haircare, contact lens solutions, baby products, body lotions and similar sorts of items.

Prescription meds are pre-prepared and packaged, a very few are made on site and these would be only at some pharmacies.

I am fascinated by the notion that some places don't have any footpaths. It's very unusual here (Perth, Western Australia) to not have a footpath on at least one side of the road. I'm wondering if mums in these areas don't go for walks with their babies in prams/strollers? Having taken my little one for a walk this morning in our surrounding streets and seen at least a half dozen other mums with prams it has me wondering.

Oh, and on the notion of drive-through bottle shops (I can think of two in my area, though I've only ever bought bags of ice from one - very handy), even though you can purchase alcohol from your car you aren't allowed to open it or drink it until you get to your destination.

One more thing that I just remembered; there was a news article this week proclaiming that drive through convenience stores are on there way here.

Oh, and on the notion of drive-through bottle shops (I can think of two in my area, though I've only ever bought bags of ice from one - very handy), even though you can purchase alcohol from your car you aren't allowed to open it or drink it until you get to your destination.

I'm not sure that's true for passengers. At least, not in NSW I don't think. I checked once but it was ages ago...

Just taking us all back to the drive-in pharmacy discussion, which by the way makes a huge deal of sense when you are talking about keeping children in the car and keeping germs from spreading. I just wanted to point out that pharmacies (also called chemists) in Australia are quite different to those that I saw when I was in the US. I went into a few Walgreens and to me they were much more like a grocery store with a small pharmacy section. Pharmacies here tend to be smaller stores with just medicine and personal products, but with a smaller range than a grocery store. So you might have vitamins, haircare, contact lens solutions, baby products, body lotions and similar sorts of items.

Prescription meds are pre-prepared and packaged, a very few are made on site and these would be only at some pharmacies.

I am fascinated by the notion that some places don't have any footpaths. It's very unusual here (Perth, Western Australia) to not have a footpath on at least one side of the road. I'm wondering if mums in these areas don't go for walks with their babies in prams/strollers? Having taken my little one for a walk this morning in our surrounding streets and seen at least a half dozen other mums with prams it has me wondering.

Oh, and on the notion of drive-through bottle shops (I can think of two in my area, though I've only ever bought bags of ice from one - very handy), even though you can purchase alcohol from your car you aren't allowed to open it or drink it until you get to your destination.

One more thing that I just remembered; there was a news article this week proclaiming that drive through convenience stores are on there way here.

It depends on where you are from. I grew up just outside of Baltimore and most of the streets have sidewalks. However, I work in and around Washington DC, quite a few of the suburbs in MD do not have sidewalks. The property goes down to the street and the streets are extra wide to accommodate parking in front of the house. When I first saw that, I was horrified. However, when I talk to co-workers and friends who live there, I have heard that some homeowners do not want sidewalks added because homeowners feel they will lose their parking spaces and up to 5ft of their property.

I believe that new construction has to have sidewalks included, but older suburbs were grandfathered in

<snip>I am fascinated by the notion that some places don't have any footpaths. It's very unusual here (Perth, Western Australia) to not have a footpath on at least one side of the road. I'm wondering if mums in these areas don't go for walks with their babies in prams/strollers? Having taken my little one for a walk this morning in our surrounding streets and seen at least a half dozen other mums with prams it has me wondering.<snip>

My neighborhood in Texas does have sidewalks, but the neighborhood directly next to us doesn't. It's pretty funny as one of the streets has a very strange boundary line for the neighborhood, and so one house at the end of the street doesn't have a sidewalk but the rest on the street do - so the sidewalk ends directly in a flowerbed! In our area, sidewalks were done by the neighborhood association at the time (our area was built up around the 1940s and 1950s) and so what each group decided back then has, for the most part, stuck around today.

The other thing is that while many neighborhoods do have sidewalks, those sidewalks don't take you to anywhere that you could get shopping or banking done - they're purely residential. So yes, I could walk around my neighborhood with a stroller, but there's a large gap between where our neighborhood ends and the nearest grocery store and banks are. I'd have to walk in the street to access those, which I'm not comfortable doing (Texas drivers are INSANE. And yes, I'm one of them )

There was a news story about sidewalks in a neighborhood near us not being used, people being forced to walk in the street because the sidewalk isn't maintained by property owners.

There is overgrown grass and weeds in the summer and ice and snow in the winter. People feel the road is safer if they need to walk somewhere. Some of those properties are abandoned so the is nobody to care for that section.

In other areas there might not be community support for the cost of sidewalks. There night be other things preventing them as well.

1) Houses built along regular streets which connect on both ends to other places, and which get through traffic from people who don't live there, and

2) Houses in dead-end neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs and looped roads which don't connect to anywhere else.

The latter is usually a large plot of land bought and developed by one builder or developer and then sold by individual houses, and almost always includes sidewalks. When people in these neighborhoods go out for a walk, it's recreational because you can't actually get anywhere except other houses.

The former is usually in older neighborhoods, larger cities, and bits and pieces of town sandwiched in between commercial districts. These may or may not have sidewalks, depending on how the city is laid out and how old the streets are. Sometimes residents here can walk to a grocery store or a bank, but that's still unusual outside urban areas.

There's a third setup, in rural areas, where houses are separated by farms and may be a long ways back from the road. Getting your mail is often enough of a walk ;-)